Mozilla executives today began a concerted campaign to prod European Union (EU) antitrust regulators to demand more from Microsoft than the browser “ballot screen” Windows will offer users later this year.

Here are some more details from Ars Tecnica, which should clarify Microsoft and NSS Labs “sponsorship” deal.

In terms of sponsorship of the reports, “this stuff is expensive to do right, and we need to monetize it somehow,” Moy told Ars. “We invited Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera to participate, but they didn’t even bother to respond, except for Opera, which stated they “don’t really focus on malware.”

Also, readers have noticed that Firefox 3.5 was not included in those tests, here is a reason (as from .pdf).

We would have liked to have been able to test Firefox 3.5 which was released on June 30, 2009, and attempted to test it alongside the other browsers. However, serious instability where the browser repeatedly crashed (a widely reported issue) along with poor results prevented its inclusion for the sake of fairness.

Although Chrome 3.0 is still in Beta, Google engineers have already started to work on Chrome 4.0 web browsers and revealed first pre-alpha builds.

As Anthony LaForge explained: We’ve officially bumped Chromium to 4.0.x to reflect our code freeze point for 3.0. There is still a bit of work that needs to be done for 3.0 in terms of stability and fixes, and to that end we will be pulling changes into the 195 branch (what will become the stable release).

Chrome 4.0 does not bring any significant changes yet, when compared to the latest 3.0 Beta snapshot.